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Viridian Geeks is an experienced, passionate Atlanta web development, web design, and SEO company. We have a team of dedicated web design and search engine optimization experts working in the metro Atlanta area. We offer many services. Web design, web development, SEO (search engine optimization), social media management, and e-commerce are our specialties. If you have an idea and can afford to make an investment in your business, we’d love to have you on board.

Web Design and Digital Marketing Personalization for Small Businesses: A Primer

Your customers want to feel like you as a small business owner understand them. They’re not interested in seeing the same, regurgitated platitudes and pushy interruption marketing gimmicks they’ve seen repeatedly. The companies that are succeeding the most in 2018 take great lengths to personalize the customer experience as far as possible.

Take Amazon for example. The company has taken personalization in marketing to great heights, developing a proprietary system keeping track of user activity on the site. When customers log in, they see personalized recommendations of other products based on their browsing and shopping history.

Amazon is just one example of personalization at work, and we understand that for small businesses, there are different challenges to overcome. That’s why we’ve created a guide on personalization in digital marketing and web design to help you. It’s always best to try to cater to each individual’s wants and desires, but surely there are applicable measures you can take that aren’t as complicated as what Amazon has developed.

What is Personalization?

Personalization is everything you do to match the expectations and needs of your customers. It’s a big deal in digital marketing and web design because most people are far more likely to respond positively to the offerings on your website. A study by Marketo shows this to be the case with 63% of the respondents who want more personalized content and user experience. To succeed as a small business online, you must always look at things from the perspective of your target audience.

It helps to create a buyer persona and construct the ideal version of a customer. Perform some market research and go on websites like Quora to see what types of questions people have about the niche you’re in. You can do this even if you already have a website as you can get more information about what makes your audience tick.

You can use the information to work on delivering an improved customer experience on your site and make adjustments as needed to your website design, content, landing pages, and anywhere else you know people will spend much of their time on.

How Can I Personalize My Business, Website, and Content?

Here are some other ways you can take to personalize your website and digital marketing better to deliver a more customized experience.

1. Find Out What Your Goals Are

Before doing anything, you need to have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish and how you’ll get there through personalization. You’ll eliminate a lot of unnecessary headaches by knowing what your scope is. Ask yourself the following questions to get started:

• Do I want to attract more niche customers to my website?• Will website personalization provide a more satisfying experience for my customers?• How will website personalization lead to stronger website retention rates?

Once you’ve thought about the answers to these questions, you can get more granular and think about specific goals you want to reach through website personalization. For a company that sells premium hiking gear, the targets may look like this:

• Boost number of email newsletter signups by 30%.• Increase average time spent on the website by 50%.• Get 500 more likes on Facebook.

Always step back and look at your business and industry and go from there. Your goals may be a bit different, but we’re confident that personalization will benefit your web design and marketing significantly.

2. Perform a Competitor Analysis

As with anything in marketing and web design, you’ll set yourself up for greater success by seeing what your competition is doing. Take 3 or 4 of your top competitors and see what they’re doing to promote their products and services.

You want to get an idea of what audiences they’re targeting and seeing which ones are likely to be the most profitable for your business. Even if you’re not planning to target the same customers, you’ll still learn much from seeing what’s already working for your competitors and adding your own unique selling proposition into the mix.

3. Narrow Your Potential Audience

You can use keyword research to segment your audience into more specific groups. Creating content based around long-tail keywords is a start. It’s an easier way to get more specific with matching the search intent of people who want answers to their problems. Based on your research, develop the content marketing and social media marketing strategies to appeal to these niche customers. You can also work personalization heavily into your SEO strategy by creating landing pages that will attract these individuals to your site.

4. Design a More Personalized Website

Always use the best practices in responsive design to create more personalized websites. Some of the content created may be hidden depending on what device is used. Your website should be flexible and accommodate a wide variety of user experiences.

Much of what personalization is about is delivering a website that fits the needs of people using different browsers and devices. A website that isn’t designed to work across all platforms is going to fail miserably and have much higher bounce rates.

Also, think about what tools and systems you want to use to bring your responsive website to life. We recommend building your website on WordPress, one of the most popular CMS systems which gives you the flexibility needed to post the type of content for your audience.

5. Test Your Website and Content Slowly

Here’s where a lot of the fun comes in. Once you have launched your website and created the content, reflect on your goals and start acting on achieving them. Experiment with different call-to-actions, thank you pages, landing pages, and blog articles to see how your customers respond. When something isn’t working, analyze the data in Google Analytics and make sure you have conversion tracking enabled.

You should also apply A/B testing to your social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, and PPC campaigns and find opportunities for personalization there too. Take your time and don’t jump to conclusions too quickly.

Run smaller tests to try to prove the model first. Like what you see? Then, you can try some larger experiments and keep going from there. If you approach personalization this way, you’re going to provide a better experience for your customers without seeming too aggressive.

Summary

Personalization takes time, effort, and consistency to generate favorable results for your small business. Don’t fret if something doesn’t work out the way you planned at first. Keep experimenting and refine the model as you go. As long as you’re getting closer to reaching your business goals, you’re on the right path towards offering a more memorable website experience for your customers.

Call our team at 470-440-3434 or email [email protected] if you’re interested in discussing possible solutions for your small business. Keep reading our blog to learn more about web design and digital marketing, and best of luck to you!